As war returns to Gaza, it is the children who are frozen in fear |

  


"As the days go on and the war intensifies, the spaces-that-are-not-war become subsumed. The conflict becomes omnipresent.

I am in a street when a house explodes in front of me; I'm on the terrace of my hotel on Gaza's beachfront when two rockets are fired at the nearby harbour wall and four children are killed, the bleeding survivors making it to our sanctuary, where we perform first aid. Suddenly the damage seems ubiquitous. You turn a corner to find glass and rubble in the street, trees felled or the road cratered.

Buildings fall in different ways. The bombs sheer off the front sometimes, as if with a knife, leaving the rooms inside exposed and furniture still sitting where it had been. Sometimes the bomb leaves nothing but a hole filled with lumps of concrete; at other times structures are concertinaed into asymmetric domes prickly with exposed steel reinforcing rods.

The explosions rearrange and make incongruous what should be domestic and familiar. Clothes spill out on to the street, a toy plastic tiger lies on its side in the rubble and dust in a room where someone has died."

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As war returns to Gaza, it is the children who are frozen in fear | World news | The Observer